


Corps-à-corps

by Astrodynamicist



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-23
Updated: 2015-04-23
Packaged: 2018-03-25 10:41:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3807319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Astrodynamicist/pseuds/Astrodynamicist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Corps-à-corps - (French "body to body") The action of two fencers coming into physical contact with one another with any portion of their bodies or hilts.</p>
<p>This is a story about two bitter rivals who became lovers, and tried to protect the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Corps-à-corps

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Femslash Big Bang's February challenge "Colours." (Yes, I'm posting this hella late. Life and Things happened.)
> 
> Big thanks to my beta IngloriousHeist!

The bodies are a flood. Filling the streets. Surging _away away away_. Screams fill the air, almost enough to cover the high keening of the sirens. They ignore shouts of Keep Calm and Don’t Run and Follow the Evacuation Route.

You are one body, one drop in the flood, no less desperate to escape than the others.

Sweat slides down your back. Heaving breaths leave the taste of ash on your tongue, and your heart pounds hard enough your whole body shakes with it. Something hard is clamped in one hand. Chopping noise dopplers above you. Helicopters. Your eyes pick out holes in the crowd, find paths away. Your foil is the hard thing in your hand. Coach is just ahead of you. The others? You glance back - Sun-mi and Mi-jung to your left. Kyu-chul off to the right. The ground shakes. You can’t find So-yi. A near-subsonic rumble rattles your chest, rises above the screams and the sirens and the helicopters into a deafening roar.

“Where’s So-yi?” Grab Coach’s arm. “ _Where’s So-yi?_ ”

“Just keep running.”

You look desperately around, scanning people instead of open spaces. Sun-mi passes you.

“Sun-mi, where’s So-yi?”

“I don’t know!”

“So-yi! _So-yi!_ ”

Someone - Kyu-chul - grabs your arm. “She slipped in the arena. I didn’t see after that.”

You turn back, but he grabs you again. “No! We have to keep going!”

Bodies surge around you. You jerk out of his grip. Mi-jung materializes in your way. Exploding missiles halo her face, drown out her words. “You can’t!” she mouths. The kaiju bellows an answering roar. Something crashes.

“ _Move_.”

You claw your way upstream. Push desperate bodies aside with both hands (foil dropped, lost underfoot somewhere). Your world narrows to the open arena doors.

To the prone form in the middle of the room.

She is groaning. Pushes herself to her knees. You scoop her up by the armpits, get her to her feet. The ground shakes. Another roar. Her frightened eyes meet yours - _why are you here?_ The _boom-boom-boom_ of a missile salvo shakes the building. Dust streams from cracks in the ceiling. You run. You both run.

One arm holding her steady, you sprint to catch the receding edge of the human flood. You glance back, and for a moment, you lock eyes with the monster. With soulless, hateful blue.

\---

You find Yuna curled up primly in a chair in the hotel lobby, a computer perched on her lap. (The training dorms were wrecked. You don’t know where she got the computer.) A forest of stubble covers her scalp, and somehow this lapse in grooming is a more impressive signifier of the chaos of the past week than the news footage of the attack was.

You know what you have to say, though you still can’t quite believe _she_ is the one you have to say it to. You’ve never liked each other, not from the first day you met on the training campus. You found her humorless. She found you arrogant. When you saw her running towards you (towards the _monster_ ), you couldn’t believe it. It seemed like a figment of your concussed imagination.

You almost wish it had been. Of all people, why did she have to be the one, the only one to run back for you?

You breathe, and swallow your pride.

“I didn’t get to thank you before.” Her eyes jerk up, cold, irritated at the interruption. You fight to keep your expression pleasant. “So thank you. For saving my life.”

“You’d have done the same.” She says it so casually, like it’s obvious. But would you have? Would you have run into near-certain death to save someone you don’t even like?

You are surprised to realize you would.

Though perhaps you shouldn’t be, considering your new career plans.... “I’m going to become a Ranger.”

She gives you the calculating look she turns on every new opponent and situation. (You hate that look.) “Does this mean you’re forfeiting your chance at the Olympics?”

“Saving the world is a little more important, don’t you think?” You offer her your sweetest smile. (She hates that smile.)

“Oh, absolutely.” She turns her computer towards you - the PPDC logo looms large on the page. It’s their enlistment guidelines. “Bet I make pilot before you do.”

“You’re on.”

\---

Pilot training is intense, but after years of Olympic prep it’s not like it’s anything you can’t handle. The hardest part is the academics - they expect all pilots to have at least basic grounding in the engineering that underlies the jaegers. You are by no means stupid, but you will admit to having sacrificed school for fencing, and now you find yourself underprepared. Pride holds your tongue about your difficulties, however. It isn’t until So-yi comes to you, eyes dark circles and proud smile a distant memory, to ask if you understood the last question on the thermodynamics quiz, and if so would you explain it to her? that you realize she has the same problem you do. Of course she does - you come from the same background, after all, even if she did grow up on the other side of the mountain.

As it happens, you did understand that question. So you explain the answer until she gets it, too. And you don’t gloat. Not even a little. Because, well. You didn’t get the second question. You hate to admit weakness to a rival, but you decide it doesn’t count if she has the same one, and so you ask her how she did on that question. Her embarrassment visibly slides away, and she takes on the teaching role. And on the pair of you go, trading questions for answers until both of you are sure you can pass the exam next week. The rest of your studies continue this way, and before long it seems strange that there was ever a night you two didn’t spend together working.

You make other friends, too, of course, but language barriers make things difficult. Your classmates hail from all over the world, and though your English (the lingua franca of the very American Kodiak Island) is passable, the lunchroom still rings with two dozen strains of gibberish. There are a few other Korean trainees, but they’re all upperclassmen and therefore too busy with their own affairs to socialize with greenies like you. So you enjoy your international friends, but it is So-yi who you grow closest to. It is So-yi who you practice with in vicious Jaeger Bushido duels. It is So-yi who, you begin to suspect, is going to be drift compatible with you.

\---

The scientists were right about common training forging strong neural handshakes.

The first time you drift, you-and-you are bombarded with nigh-indistinguishable memories of fencing, of shuffling lunge-steps and precise wrist-flicks and the lightning-fast calculations it takes to outwit your opponent. Glimpses of other memories - your half-sister’s wedding, _your_ little brothers saying goodbye, _your_ first kiss and yours, arriving at Kodiak Island - break up the flow, but it is those of fencing that help your brains sort out how to sync up your muscles and your thoughts.

You-and-you move in tandem in the simulator Conn-Pod without hesitation or miscue, flowing through a series of punches to prove the connection works. Satisfied, you announce your readiness to the sim operator. The blank space of the trial gives way to city outskirts and the hulking form of a kaiju. It looks at you and roars. The sound doubles as memory overlays it, the sound larger, shaking your ribcage, you are dizzy and confused, you are lifting yourself up by your armpits, you are running, you are looking up into its eyes, its awful blue eyes-

You are looking _across_ into its eyes. You are level with its eyes, this time. Now is not then. The memory falls back. You engage.

First time drifting, you-and-you earn one kill to one drop in just shy of an hour. For a first try, this is very well done. You-and-you feel triumphant, and just a little bit invincible.

When the drift ends, it is a shock to come back to your solitary body. They told you to expect a level of disorientation after, but it is so much more than that. You are abruptly missing half of yourself and yet simultaneously still linked by some tenuous connection that just eludes your grasp. You know where she is without knowing where she is on your way out of the simulator rooms. During the evaluation interview, you seamlessly pick up each other’s trains of thought halfway through sentences, switching who’s answering without so much as looking at each other. And still, you ache for the rest of you.

The pilot’s handbook suggests using touch to help distinguish bodies after a drift. You try. You really do. But an exercise in finding the boundaries of your own skin quickly becomes one in feeling hers, and likewise she explores you. Neither of you want to differentiate, and so you try to merge back together, pressing your bodies as close as they’ll go, one’s lips opening for the other’s tongue. Your hand is between her legs, or perhaps hers is between yours. Your desperate, hungry noises egg each other on.

When it is all over, you and she are neither merged nor distinguished. For the moment, you are too blissed-out to care.

\---

The last time you drift, the memories that bind you are of each other - of sex and past deployments and even still of fencing, though those feel a million years old. When the screen of memory clears, you-and-you raise metal arms in a doubled fencer’s salute. LOCCENT completes its final checks, and you head out. This kaiju is a Category IV, and it has already ripped through a pair of Mark III’s. Cherno Alpha,  the only other jaeger stationed with you, is still damaged from its last fight. Its ground crew tries desperately to finish repairs, but as you approach the Miracle Mile outside Vladivostok, something stony and cold in your gut says they aren’t going to make it in time. This monster you face alone.

Your first visual is the swirls of phosphorescent blue blood curling across the night-dark sea. Then the water shifts and pours down as the kaiju rises. It’s covered in wounds, but none enough to weaken it much. What eyes it has left burn in a neat line under the bony, half-moon protrusion of its brow. As always, another set of burning blue eyes superimpose themselves, but you-and-you shake off that memory and its echoed terror.

The monster roars. You engage.

You flick your right hand to unsheathe its wrist-blade, raise your left which spins and reshapes into your plasmacaster. The shot charges. The kaiju drops its massive front arms and rushes you in a four-limbed tackle. You brace yourself, get the blade in front of you and just manage to make the beast impale itself on it as it grabs you. Blade-hand braced against its shoulder, you bring the plasmacaster up against the kaiju’s ribs, release the shot. It howls, jerks sideways hard. Trapped in its shoulder, you lose your balance. You try to disengage the blade but the kaiju jerks again and it snaps off. The plasmacaster is still recharging. The kaiju’s smaller arms hook claws into the casing around it, jerk it away from its side. You struggle to get it back on the beast, but then it bites your left shoulder. Its bigger hand curls around your upper arm, _pulls_. You-and-you scream. You fire the shot but just miss. Charge it up again, but you won’t have another shot - it bites again, lower, twisting the arm and-

your arm gives way. You-and-you scream. Your left side is agony. You punch its head with your other fist, jam the jagged remnants of your blade against its neck. It jerks you closer with its other big arm and its little ones grab you around the waist. You keep hitting it, feel something under your hand already cracked give way, but it doesn’t flinch. Its lesser arms tighten their grip, sink their claws deeper into your waist. You-and-you scream again. Its big arm swings for your head, you catch it with your remaining one, but it mirrors the strike on the side you can’t defend and your face is a wall of agony. It strikes again and your sight goes out. The holographic displays glitch wildly under strobing red alarm lights. Another strike. Everything shakes. Everything hurts. Cracks open on a starry sky and one massive, glowing blue eye.

There’s pressure on your chest and you’re tipping backwards. Water floods in. Everything is a burning blue haze and then

nothing.

 

 


End file.
